Major update to dpreview forums coming soon: tell us what you think

In an ongoing effort to improve the performance and user experience on dpreview, we've rewritten and redesigned the forums, and will be launching the new version in a few days. From a look-and-feel standpoint, we made an effort to stay faithful to the core of the old design (no point throwing out the bits that work well) and from a functional standpoint, we focused on adding, rather than removing features.

The new forums look a bit different (nicer, we think) and are built on totally different code, so there will inevitably be a few things you'll have to get used to. Below you'll find some images of the new design and descriptions of what's new, and what's been changed. We encourage you to provide feedback, positive or critical, as we make the finishing touches. We're nearly ready, but if there's anything we've missed, we want to know before this goes live.

As we set out on what ended up being the major task of redesigning our forums, we had two main goals. As well as adding some long-overdue features that bring our forums into the 21st Century, we also focused on addressing the most common comments and criticisms that we get in user feedback.

For example, there is a lot of great information and advice shared in the forums every day, but it is often difficult to find. To solve this, we implemented a number of new navigation and design aspects that will both help users find what they were looking for, and hopefully, discover a few things along the way.

Here's a quick outline of the new forums - please let us know what you think.

Top-level forum pages:

The new forum index pictured above shows off the new color schemes and increased spacing that pervades the rest of the forums design.

Posting and viewing pages:

The posting and viewing pages have also been substantially reworked:

The posting panel is now a full WYSIWYG interface, with buttons on the right for directly linking to an image on the internet, for uploading from your computer or for pulling an image from your dpreview gallery.

The main viewing screen has a number of changes. Dots next to each post appear white for unread posts and turn grey once read. At the forum level, partially-read threads will be represented by half-white dots. Note also the ability to preview a post by hovering over the post.

The record of which posts you've read will now be stored on our servers, not in your browser, so the read status of threads will be correct whatever device you log-in on.

Questions and Answers

For years we've been discussing ways in which we could make it easier for users can find the information they are looking for on dpreview in general, and the forums specifically. We've made some progress on our product search and comparison tools, but we recognize that forum threads often contain extremely useful information on a wide range of topics, and it isn't exposed very well. To this end, we've introduced a new thread type, 'Questions', which enables you to specifically mark a post as a question.

Once you're happy that the question has been answered, you can mark the best, most useful response as a 'top answer' for all to see. We plan to begin displaying the top questions throughout the site on product pages and widgets to help existing users and newcomers find the most interesting and useful posts.

The original poster can identify which response best answers their question.

Once marked as answered, subsequent visitors can jump straight to the selected answer.

The selected answer post is clearly marked, but can be de-selected if a better answer is given later.

Answered and unanswered threads are easily visible and can be used as filters, so you can find questions still in need of an answer.

User and post ranking

It has been a long time coming, but, we've added user rankings into user profiles. In this initial version a user's ranking is defined simply by the number of posts they've made and the date they signed up. However, in the near future we will be incorporating a considerably more complex logic which uses forum and site activity to influence ranking.

Additionally, we've incorporated ratings into the forums, so as you browse through threads you can up- and down-vote posts. This will later be tied-in to user rankings and will also allow us to add a feature to rank posts by popularity - making it easier to get to the most interesting threads.

Individual posts can be up- or down-voted. Note also the white dots for unread posts and

Each post has voting tabs.

Votes on the original post appear at forum level.

We realize that many users are so used to the existing design, for better or for worse, that we wanted to provide some options that will help put the choice in your hands as to how the forums work for you.

There's an option for a collapsed view, which more closely resembles the current forum view.

And, at the bottom of the page, an option to view in the legacy custard colorscheme.

Full list of changes

New features:

WYSIWYG text editor (no more markup)

New 'Question and Answer' threads

New 'breadcrumb trails' and quick-jump navigation at the top of each page

The key thing to realise though, is that, while these initial changes may not seem huge, they represent only the visible aspect of the months of hard work that has gone into totally re-coding the forums. There is a lot of data in the forums and we prioritized speed and consistency in how we approached this upgrade.

The old forums were originally written in 1999 and have done an admirable job in helping to build and foster the dpreview community into what it is today. But the software industry has come a long way since then, and adding new features onto a software platform that is no longer supported, as well as maintaining it was not an option if we wanted to provide new and exciting features to the community.

Now that the new forums are using a software platform with modern conveniences, we can react quickly to feedback provided by the community and easily add new features. (Different 'skins' for instance)

Why do you have a separate option for Question when you start a new thread?

I've only just realised it's a separate option and the OP can't select "Answered" if they selected the traditional option of "New Thread". Why not solely have the "Question" option so the OP always has the option to select most relevant post?The two different types of threads are not obvious within a forum, anyway. The only difference seems to be if the OP selects "New Thread" there's no way to select an answer, whereas if the OP selects "Question" they then have the option to select an Answer.

I don't have enough time now to scroll all the way down to see if this was mentioned but I am getting a weird bug that when I quote someone in a thread and hit enter twice to skip two lines, the page freezes on me. It happens every single time, I'm very forgetful because I do this on other forums. Has this been addressed?

Craigslist is still my favorite site because it runs lean and mean without all the crappy "web 2.0" frills that always bug out and never behave correctly across all devices. DPreviews old forums were some of the last decent, old school forums, free of stupid ranking systems, post-hiding censorship BS, and all the other nonsense you're adding.

Empowering prejudiced down-voters is no replacement for good community moderators, and just makes them lazy.

The Q&A feature is a rip-off of StackExchange; that's what the photography stackexchange site is for. It has no place being mixed in with your forums.

When you're posting look up at the menu bar (In the editor window). You'll see three square boxes that resemble photos. One of the boxes is "Insert image from web", one is "Insert image from DPR gallery" the final box is "Insert image from computer" (or something like that). Rolling your mouse over these buttons shows what the button does.

To post from smug, Go to smug and get the URL of the image the same way you always did...

Click the "Insert photo from web" (or something like that) button. A dialogue box will open. There's a place in that dialogue box for you to insert the URL of your image.

Once you do that, click to insert the image and you're done.

Sorry, I'm a lousy teacher. It's easier to do than my instructions imply.

Images I have posted in threads from my gallery of images edited in LR$.2 do not show camera make and model. That information shows in the gallery. Anyone know if this is something I am doing wrong or a fault with the new format?? Tried searching but didn't guess the correct search terms so came up empty.

The color scheme is HORRIBLE and hard on my eyes! The black background everywhere makes the blue, white, yellow text just "blast" into my eyes to the point that I don't stay on the DPReview site nearly as long as I used to.

Also, the center area where the posts are is not wide enough. Post headings are short and getting wrapped. You have plenty of room so widen things out!

Hi there,I'm not sure if I seem to have overlooked something...but someone in an earlier post mentioned you can change the colour of the pages. I have looked everywhere and cannot seem to come across anything that seems remotely close to being able to do so.Many thanks, Grace.

Perhaps I missed this. I used to be able to log into my favorite forum, and see just the new messages (since my last visit) at the top. Usually a handful, I could quickly scan to see if I was interested in them. Now, there does not seem to be a way that clearly indicates which are new since my last visit. That, plus the new color and layout, is quite exhausting on the eyes and brain. I must be missing something.Les

About the THREAD VIEW....Am i the only one finding disturbing the highlighting of all your messages in a thread.....??? At the forum level (thread list) can be useful .... but if in a thread you have more posts .... it quite disturbing visually and you can't really spot which is the one being displayed as yours own ones are highlighted all in the same way....

I think inside the thread is more comfortable to highlighted the selected one....Of course if you have only one post in a thread you will not notice it .....

I TOTALLY dislike the reduced image quality when viewing an image. I will not come here as often now unless they change it back the way it was..Is there a way to see or not see EXIF when viewing an image? This sucks too.

How does one now reply to specific parts of a long post? It was alway useful to be able to insert comments at appropriate points of a discussion - the > preserving the formatting of the previous poster(s)

I agree. Mobile devices, like the iPad, are the future. That's the direction that we're headed in. If the "new" dpreview forum isn't being designed with tablets in mind, then the dpreview forum designers are being extremely shortsighted. There are two iPads in use in my household. I have a dozen friends who now use iPads too. Sights that aren't iPad friendly just don't get visited as often, or not at all, since we now spend so much time on our iPads.

Congratulations for the new forums!. One useful thing that I think you missed is to show somehow (indentation or a more creative way) the hierarchy of posts in flat view. In my BB I always use flat view for obvious reasons and it's difficult to know who answered whom.

OK just had my first look at the new forums and I absolutely hate them, but maybe I'm overlooking a setting that could "fix" my problems?

Your unforgivable sin?

You waste precious vertical space and you don't implement a variable width to take advantage of horizontal space.

Zoomed in to full screen, I can get 1 maybe 2 posts on the screen.

Look at slickdeals.net arstechnica.com anandtech.com and so on. All of them are variable width. Y'all are still stuck in the 90's. Either slim down your use of verticle space per post or allow your forums to stretch out.

- Please get rid of the hard to read turquoise- Make the thread titles more compact again - too much scrolling required now- Make replying with a quote more intuitive: My first reply in the new format ended up in the signature which is hidden by default, and I still haven't figured out where to put the reply to a quoted post in this format.

Where does it indicate that the thread has images in it? This my prime reason for openning a thread. Now it appears you have to open each thread to find out if it has images. This is not moving forward!

Top posters in forum not current. Haven't even seen some of these names on the forum in months. What is up? Perhaps this is no longer forum specific? Hate the black background. Can't say this enough. Trying to read text on it is hard on the eyes. Reminds me of 1988 monochrome displays and trying to do word processing on them. On top of that, just plain ugly!

CyberAngel, black doesn't imply less battery consumption in LCD displays, as they are constantly illuminated in the background and the LCD matrix displays black just hiding the backligth. Plasma displays do work the way you say. But as you, I find black backgrounds more comfortable to read, has there's less ligth hitting the eyes.

May I suggest Ad-Block. Works a treat. You need to be using Firefox browser though. I don;t know if Ad-Block works for other browsers. I am using it right now and I do not see even one single advertisement anywhere on this page.

I would like to see the ability for the OP to flag portions of threads that they started, as off subject or flaming. Not to delete them just mark them with colors so readers interested in the subject don't waste their time reading through unrelated posts.

I would suggest less bright font color on the black background. The current font color is too bright which hurts your eyes. If the font is grey color it would be much more comfortable for reading and keep me being on the site longer.

Another thing to suggest is video for introducing a new camera to show the speed of autofocus in low light conditions, and other major features of the camera.

I've always loved your reviews and news articles, they take all the guesswork out of buying - so huge thanks for them, but unless you've found a way to remove all the trolls which lurk here I think I'll stick to other, friendlier, forums. I won't name [forum] names here, because I'd hate for them to become infested.

Ok I I'd not read all of the replies but it looks good thanks for the hard work. I must be one of the few who like the blue on black , less strain on the eyes.

One thing that seems to be missing is spell check, you have an audience from around the world and English is not everyone's strong point, nothing to work my buttons more than a clown that insists on telling me I spelt something wrong, there must be others out there feeling the same.